What Is A Buyer’s Persona?
Buyer’s persona refers to the data-based or semi-fictional profile of a customer that shows demographic, interest, challenges, and decision-making factors.
For better understanding, we can say that a buyer’s persona can describe age, gender, interest, location, device type, pain points, goals, and more.
A buyer persona is also known as a customer persona or marketing persona.
An organization could have multiple buyer personas. But, as a small business, the right approach is to start with one or two buyer personas.
It will help you to perform effective marketing and sales efforts.
Benefits To Build A Buyer’s Persona
The 4 benefits to having a clear buyer’s persona:
Enhanced Product Development: Any product is a solution to the audience that helps to eliminate some kind of problems and challenges in their lives. A buyer’s persona can help in product development to fulfill the needs of a specific audience.
Effective Marketing: Not everyone is your customer. Showing your ads to the right audience is important for good ROI and brand positioning. A buyer’s persona always helps marketers to identify their targeted audience to create efficacious campaigns to build better brand value online and offline.
More Sales: As a salesperson when you know the pain points, challenges, fears, interests, and goals of your targeted customer then you can convert them easily. Buyer’s persona helps salespeople to understand their customers and build a long-term relationship with them. In short, better customer understanding means more capability to handle objections and it will end up with more sales.
Strong Customer Support: Post-sales you still get in touch with the customer for lifetime customer value or recurring sales. When the customer support team knows who they are talking with and what challenges their customers are facing it is not only easy to give them support but also handling angry customers becomes easier.
How To Make A Strong Buyer’s Persona?
Buyer’s persona should be only created on the basis of data to get the idea of what people are actually facing and how you can solve their problems through your products and services.
An organization can do internal and external research to build a strong buyer’s persona. You can organize surveys, a predefined template of questions on your website, and many more ideas to do the research.
But, how would you segregate what data you needed to actually build a strong buyer’s persona?
Every business is unique because of industry, competition, goals, and many more factors. But, here are the common 6 categories under which you can ask the most relevant and necessary questions from your customers.
Personal Details
The basic personal details of your customer are important to create the foundation of your buyer’s persona. Here are the type of details you can collect from your customer:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Education
- Income
- Marital Status
- Children
Professional Details
Professional details help to understand the lifestyle and purchasing power of your customer. Here are the details you could collect:
- Profession
- Job Title
- Company Name/Company Type
- Working Time
- Special Skills
- Company Size
Goals/Challenges
Goals and challenges help to recognize the pain points of a customer. The details you can collect are mentioned below:
- What are their career goals?
- How do they prioritize those goals?
- What challenges are they facing?
- How can your product or service be a solution for them?
Where Are They
- Which location do they live in?
- At what time are they available?
- How do they like to communicate?
- What social media do they use the most?
- Where do they spend?
Values And Fears
- What do they value the most in their personal or professional life?
- What factors do they consider when they buy a product or service like yours?
- What drives their decision-making process?
Negative Info
Customers that you don’t want:
- Too expensive
- To difficult to educate them
- Not enough budget
- Wrong industry
- Wrong demographic
How To Document A Buyer’s Persona
Hubspot provides a free tool to document a buyer’s persona.
Simply, follow the below-mentioned steps to create your buyer’s persona:
- Go to HubSpot tool “Make My Persona”
- On the right side click the button “Build My Persona”
- Fill in all the details you know about your customer step-by-step
- After filling in all the details your buyer’s persona will be ready
- On the up right corner click the button “Download/Export”
- Fill in your personal and business details
- Click the button “Download Now”
- Click the button “Download PDF”
Congratulations you have successfully downloaded your buyer’s persona.
Conclusion
Buyer’s persona is an important factor to understand for a business to not only increase the profitability but also to survive in the marketing for the long term.
Categorizing the important attributes of your customer will always provide you more accuracy than the predictions.
